Kick the Drink… Easily!

Jason Vale’s book “Kick the Drink… Easily!” suggests that it is easy for someone to stop drinking because there is no such thing as an alcoholic. Alcohol completely leaves your system within 10 days so the idea that it is a lifelong problem is “brainwashing”. Once you remove it, you can just stop drinking.

It was an interesting read, though I do not agree with all of it.

He makes a lot of astute points. Alcohol gets a special treatment among recreational drugs. When you say you don’t drink, people ask you why. Nobody has ever asked me why I don’t take crack. Alcohol is a drug and it messes up the human body.

It also tastes like piss. We all know it. We all had that first drink, it was horrible. But we kept at it because it was the socially acceptable thing to do and gradually built up a tolerance to the horrible taste. But at the end of the day it is still a poison that our body does not like.

It goes on. Does it make you more sociable? Probably not when you think about it. People slur their words, withdraw themselves from conversation and become violent. 75% of stabbings involve intoxication. It’s expensive. It’s had for our health. It makes us feel horrible the next day. Why then do we do it?

I don’t agree with all his points. For example, it could offer a pleasurable effect. Being “numb to the world” as it he puts it, could be thought of as pleasurable if you are not happy with your live.

It also does grease the wheels of social interaction. While I do not think being intoxicated actually does make it any easier for me to talk to new people at parties, or make me a more interesting or lively person, it does help many of us get together with long-term partners.

As for his tenet that there is no such thing as alcoholism, that is less clear. Mainly because nobody can really agree on what alcoholism is.

Overall, I think it makes a good case against alcohol. It is more a large collection of anecdotes than a well cited review of the evidence. However, we all know that this evidence is out there. The book is designed to convince people to stop drinking, and people often respond better to anecdotes than hard evidence.

Although, that does appear to be a quote from the Daily Mail on there.